The commonality of bad movies and bad religion

Face it. Star Wars sucked. Even the original movie, which I remember fondly and vastly enjoyed watching, was horribly written — that George Lucas did not have an ear for dialog, and once he drifted away from a simple mythic archetype couldn’t put a plot together to save his life, was something that became increasingly evident throughout the series.

And Star Trek? Embarrassingly bad science, hammy acting, and an over-reliance on gobbledygook and the deus ex machina. There was maybe a small handful of episodes that were more than cheesy dreck.

So why do people adore those shows so fanatically?

Here’s one interesting explanation: cult movies plug into the same cognitive keyholes as religion does. The article is a bit superficial — comparing Star Wars to Catholicism, Star Trek to protestantism, and the recent Star Trek retcon/reboot to Mormonism is stretching the analogy way too much. But there’s something to it.

The Star Wars/Star Trek phenomena are a bit odd; I watch bad movies sometimes for entertainment, but I never lose myself in apologetics for them. They’re bad movies. They’re fun for the comic opera klutziness of them, and half the pleasure is being able to stand above them and outside them, and appreciate the sincerity of the exercise in slapping together a weird piece of crap in spite of little obstacles, like a lack of money or talent. But Star Wars/Star Trek have serious fans who devotedly study the lore and get into arguments about which is better, and even think they represent some high quality story telling.

I will boldly predict that some people will be arguing for that in the comments. Of course, they’re wrong. They sucked. Just like religion.

So the question is why do people cling to them…and it seems to me that our brains are equipped with a kind of ideological inertia, which is probably a good thing, since you don’t want to too casually flip-flop on ideas before you’ve worked out their viability. But sometimes we seem to be prone to a pathological degree of attachment, where because once we favored some strange object of worship, whether it’s Jesus or Spock or America or the Green Bay Packers, we can’t let go. Changing our minds would be an admission that we were wrong and could be wrong about something we regard as important in our lives, and there’s a reasonable fear that opening the door to that kind of uncertainty might lead to chaos.

There’s also a peculiar inability to separate the parts from the whole. You can like classical sacred music without endorsing the silliness about magic crackers and Original Sin, just as you can enjoy a light sabre battle on the screen without getting goofy over The Force.

So what is religion? It’s a parasite on a couple of useful features of how the mind works, its tendency to try and model the world around us as a coherent whole and its reluctance to abandon models that fail to work. It’s a particularly successful parasite because it can be introduced early, with mother’s milk, well before they get plonked down in front of the boobtube, and so it generally outcompetes Captain Picard…and it also gets relatively little pushback from the culture once the child leaves the breast to spend more time with outsiders, who are all praising the same mysterious being, and so far Yoda worship isn’t very common.

The first persuasive argument for Christianity that I’ve seen

I was sent this link to an apologist defending Christianity against rationalist requests for evidence, and I was unimpressed — all he’s got is repeated claims that the Bible says Jesus was lord of the universe, which is not a good argument. I can also point to the Lord of the Rings, which says Gandalf was a powerful wizard, but that doesn’t even begin to support any claim that he actually existed.

But I read on, and it got weird. Read this, and somebody explain to me…is he arguing for or against Christianity?

As for the empirical and falsifiable evidence scientists and atheists demand, let’s just say it might never be found, at least not on this side of the grave. It may not even exist. And even if someone does find it, along with the missing link, it will probably be like nothing they ever expected.

But if you look up in the sky some cold winter’s night around the 25th of December, you just might catch a glimpse of it. No, it’s not the space shuttle, or a Russian spy satellite; nor is it an Iranian missile with a nuclear warhead or some other terrorist attack; it’s certainly not Louis Farrakhan’s mothership, or any other extraterrestrial spacecraft. Is it a myth? Is it science?

No — it’s Santa Claus! And if you don’t believe that well, you just ain’t trying. Or maybe what you really need is a little less science, and a little more myth.

OK, I give up. He has convinced me. Jesus is just as real as Santa Claus.

Look at it as a promising sign of the rapidly accelerating senility of religion

Last week, the CNN Belief blog published some transparently inane pseudoscience from Oprah.com; this week, it’s publishing some awesomely trivial tripe about where your dog goes after death (how does the author know they go to heaven? He dug up some Bible verses, of course.)

This is amazingly bad stuff. It’s as if there is some sneering, mocking atheist who has been put in charge of CNN’s religion section, and she gets up every morning on a quest to find whatever will make religion look profoundly stupid…and she succeeds three minutes after going to work, and spends the rest of the day sipping lattes and cocktails while writing scenarios for her nightly Dungeons & Dragons game.

There is a danger to thinking this way, though: pretty soon you’re wondering if Pope Ratzi isn’t actually some godless antitheist mole for the Global Atheist Conspiracy, because he’s doing such a good job of making Catholicism look evil, and every silly expression of faith begins to look like an intentional effort to discredit themselves. Either the world is dominated by a lot of atheist weirdos who get off on making everyone else look ridiculous, or religion really is this goofy. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, so I’m going to have to favor the latter.

What’s the difference between the Vatican and the Mafia?

At least the Mafia doesn’t tolerate baby-rapers in its ranks.

Otherwise, though, they’re both shady organizations with very tightly closed ranks and a sense of privilege. It seems the Vatican is also suspected of criminal enterprises — it has its very own private, secretive bank that is accused of money laundering, and recently had about $30 million in assets seized.

I don’t think the Vatican has any ties to grisly gangland murders, though…oh, wait.

Calvi headed the Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in 1982 after the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans made to dummy companies in Latin America. The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans.

Calvi was found a short time later hanging from scaffolding on Blackfriars Bridge, his pockets loaded with 11 pounds of bricks and $11,700 in various currencies. After an initial ruling of suicide, murder charges were filed against five people, including a major Mafia figure, but all were acquitted after trial.

While denying wrongdoing, the Vatican Bank paid $250 million to Ambrosiano’s creditors.

Now I’m thinking about getting a tattoo

Blasphemy laws have some novel consequences. Take the case of this devout fellow who uses his name as a legal weapon.

Pakistani authorities have arrested a doctor on suspicion of violating the country’s contentious blasphemy law by throwing away a business card of a man who shared the name of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, police said Sunday.

…

The case began Friday when Muhammad Faizan, a pharmaceutical company representative, visited Valiyani’s clinic and handed out his business card. He said when the doctor threw the card away, Faizan went to police and filed a complaint that noted his name was the same as the prophet’s.

If mere business cards with a holy name written on them must be treated with reverence and respect, well, I’m just going to have to get my favorite body parts tattooed with the names of gods and prophets. I’m goin’ for the full Muhammad…I’m afraid a cowardly weenie like Mr Faizan is out of luck, and will have to settle for “Mu”.

Another “sovereign state” affected by Wikileaks

This time, it’s the Vatican. Wikileaks has released documents related to the Irish priest scandals.

Pope Benedict refused to allow Vatican officials to testify in an investigation by an Irish commission into alleged child sex abuse by priests, according to U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, The Guardian newspaper reported.

Benedict was also reportedly furious when Vatican officials were called upon in Rome, The Guardian reported Saturday.

The Murphy Commission of Inquiry into sexual and physical abuse “offended many in the Vatican,” according to a cable dated February 26, 2010.

No surprises. The Pope was more concerned about his little city-state than he was about the kids.

Oh, also…the Irish government caved in to the Catholics.

The Irish government, meanwhile, wanted “to be seen as co-operating with the investigation” because its churches and education department were also involved in the scandal.

The Irish ambassador’s deputy, Helena Keleher, told U.S. diplomats that her government eventually acquiesced to the Vatican and granted their officials immunity from testifying, the Guardian reported.

The testimony they did get was damning…how much worse was the situation? We won’t know, because the Vatican did its best to cover up the story.

I just look at the pictures

I can’t understand a word that’s written in this article, but I like the cartoon.

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Somebody should make a similar one for moderate Christians…they can tut-tut over murdered abortion doctors, they can make excuses for pedophile priests, they can go in a voting booth and pull the lever against gay rights, but an atheist puts up a billboard that says you can be good without gods, and zowee! Screaming fits on Fox News!

Scratch the Salvation Army off your charity lists, everyone

I used to always give my spare change to the Salvation Army at this time of year — there they were, ringing their bell outside the grocery store, so sure, I’d give a little. That changed when I learned about their anti-gay policies, though…and now there’s another reason to spurn the Salvation Army.

The Salvation Army says it refuses to distribute Harry Potter and Twilight toys collected for needy children because they’re incompatible with the charity’s Christian beliefs.

The policy has alarmed a Calgarian who volunteered to sift through a southeast warehouse full of unused, donated items and was alarmed when he was told by Salvation Army officials that the two kinds of toys are “disposed of” and not given to other charities.

“I asked if these toys went to another charitable organizations but was told no, that by passing these toys on to another agency for distribution would be supporting these toys,” said the man, who wouldn’t give his name due to his occupation.

So donors may have handed over popular toys for distribution, not knowing that the destination was going to be the landfill. And it’s not because the Salvation Army is concerned about the quality or educational value of the toys…

“I was told to withhold a six-inch Harry Potter figure, but when I picked up a plastic M-16, I was told, ‘That’s for the 10-year-olds,'” he said.

I feel so dumb for having ever given that organization anything. I should have been clued in by the frickin’ name that it was run by a gang of puffed-up sanctimonious looneys.

Let’s poll the readers and see if it’s OK to kill children with neglect

It’s another of those horrible stories of an ignorant fundie family with a sick child who could be easily cured by modern medicines, but they chose to treat him with the uselessness of prayer…and guess what happens? They’re now the proud parents of a corpse.

The media doesn’t help. They give a voice to all the frauds saying things like, “Our teaching is to trust Almighty God for everything in life: for health, for healing, for protection, for provisions, for avenging of wrongs” and “The result was not what they wanted because our faith is imperfect at times. But God is perfect.” And then they go further and create a stupid poll for specious validation of the majority view.

Do you believe in the power of prayer to heal?

Yes 7.1%
Yes, but in conjunction with medicine 54.8%
No 38.1%
Don’t know 0%

That “Yes, but in conjunction with medicine” is such a common cop-out. This is what the apologists for religion do: let the stuff that works give cover for the lies they spew that do nothing and do harm. And they’re just as wicked as the ones who flatly say yes.

It’s the cover-up, stupid

Bad news out of Germany: they’ve been investigating cases of priestly child abuse, and found lots (159 priests, 15 deacons, 96 religion teachers and six pastoral employees implicated so far), but they also found evidence of a systematic cover-up by the Catholic church.

Germany’s Catholic Church systematically covered up cases of sexual abuse within its own ranks for several decades, according to an expert study commissioned by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising.

The lawyer heading up the investigation, Marion Westpfahl, said at a press conference on Friday that the available records pointed to huge gaps in the documentation between 1945 and 2009. She added this hinted strongly at a “systematic system of cover-up,” in which few abuse cases were criminally prosecuted.

“Only 26 priests were convicted for sexual offences,” Westpfahl explained to reporters, saying she found 365 files containing evidence that “acts of abuse had taken place in an almost commonplace manner.”

“We have to assume that there is a large unknown number [of abuse cases],” she said. “We are dealing with the extensive destruction of files.”

Note also:

Westpfahl also said that the period of 1977 to 1982, when Pope Benedikt XVI – then Archbishop Josef Ratzinger – headed up the archdiocese, was particularly poorly documented.

So now we know what he’s good at — burying the bodies.

The study was commissioned by Archbishop Reinhard Marx, who made this little comment that somehow reminded me of someone else.

For me, these were surely the worst months of my life. I felt shame, grief and dismay. As a church, we ask forgiveness for those things done by our church employees.

No one gives a damn about your worst moment, Marx. Think about how awful it was for the people under your care, instead.

I am beginning to understand why Christians makes such a big deal about forgiveness. It’s because they need it so much.